You cannot read Russian foreign policy without first looking at Russian geography. Russia is the largest country in the world, a plain that runs from the Polish border to the Pacific with almost no natural defensive features between Smolensk and the Urals. Every serious invasion of Russia in the modern era — the Poles (1605), Sweden (1708), Napoleon (1812), Germany twice (1914, 1941) — came across this plain, and each was survived only at catastrophic cost. From Moscow, foreign policy is not primarily about ideology or ambition; it is about the fact that the country has no mountains, no seas, no rivers to hide behind, and that safety has always meant pushing the frontier outward until it hits something that stops an army. Everything else — NATO, Ukraine, Syria, warm-water ports — flows from this.
From the Western map, NATO's post-1991 enlargement — Poland, the Baltics, Romania, Bulgaria, and the promise made at Bucharest in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia 'will become members' — is the peaceful integration of countries choosing their own alliances. From the Kremlin's map, it is the systematic advance of a hostile military alliance from the Elbe to within 500 kilometres of Moscow, in violation (as Moscow claims) of verbal assurances given to Gorbachev in 1990. Whether those assurances were binding is contested; that Russians across the political spectrum, including liberals, believe they were is not. This is the frame in which the invasion of Georgia (2008), the annexation of Crimea (2014) and the full-scale war in Ukraine (2022) are presented at home — not aggression, but a delayed defensive response to a strategic threat that Western capitals refused to negotiate.
Russia has more coastline than any country on earth and almost none of it is useful. The Arctic freezes; the Pacific coast is remote and blockable; the Baltic exits through the Danish straits; the Black Sea through the Bosphorus. Since Peter the Great, every Russian regime has fought to reach and hold warm-water ports that cannot be closed by another power. This is the geographic constant behind seemingly disconnected events: the annexation of Crimea and the naval base at Sevastopol; the Syrian intervention and the base at Tartus (Russia's only Mediterranean facility); the militarisation of Kaliningrad; the pressure on Georgia and the port of Batumi; the fortification of Vladivostok. In each case the specifics differ; the underlying imperative — do not lose year-round naval access — does not.
For most Russian strategic thinkers — not just Putin, and not just nationalists — Ukraine is not a foreign country in the sense that France or Poland are. It is the historical heartland (Kyivan Rus), the demographic reservoir, the industrial belt of the late Soviet Union, and the geographical corridor along which every invasion of Russia has travelled. A Ukraine inside NATO, hosting Western missile systems 500 km from Moscow, is treated as intolerable in a way that the German or Polish accessions were not. The 2022 invasion — catastrophically executed, hugely costly, strategically arguably self-defeating — is nonetheless entirely consistent with a 300-year Russian view of Ukraine's status. That the majority of Ukrainians disagree profoundly, and are willing to die to prove it, is the pivot on which the century turns.
The intellectual scaffolding for Russian foreign policy since roughly 2007 (Putin's Munich speech) draws on two very different sources: Henry Kissinger's classical balance-of-power realism, and Alexander Dugin's Eurasianism — the idea of Russia as a distinct civilisation, neither European nor Asian, whose destiny is to lead a Eurasian bloc against Atlantic maritime power. Publicly, the framing is milder: a 'multipolar world' in which Washington's unipolar moment ends and power is distributed among Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasília, and other rising capitals. In practice this means opposing US-led coalitions almost reflexively, courting BRICS+, weaponising energy exports, and treating international institutions as arenas in which to erode Western agenda-setting power rather than as universal norms.
The Sino-Russian relationship post-2022 is the one Moscow spent decades trying to avoid — junior partnership to a much larger and more dynamic neighbour with a long historical grievance over the 'unequal treaties' that took the Russian Far East. Yet the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions left no alternative. China now buys the discounted oil, supplies the electronics and machine tools, provides the payment rails, and shields Russia diplomatically. From Moscow this is presented as a strategic realignment toward Eurasia; privately, it is understood as dependence on a partner whose interests will not always align. The Kremlin's hope is that a multipolar future comes fast enough that Russia is not simply absorbed into a Chinese sphere of influence in Central Asia and the Far East.
Russia is a petro-state — around 40% of the federal budget in normal years comes from oil and gas. Energy is Moscow's primary economic lever and its primary vulnerability. The pre-2022 strategy was to make Europe dependent on Russian gas (Nord Stream 1 and 2) so that European support for Ukraine or NATO enlargement could be conditioned on winter heating bills. That leverage collapsed after the invasion — Europe absorbed the shock, pivoted to LNG and Norwegian gas, and now imports almost no Russian pipeline gas. The pivot to Asia works but at deep discounts, with limited infrastructure (Power of Siberia 1 exists; 2 is stalled) and with China holding all the pricing power. Russian energy is still a weapon, but a duller and less reliable one than it was.
The former Soviet republics — the 'near abroad' in Russian usage — are not treated as fully sovereign in Moscow's operational map. They are a sphere in which Russia claims a droit de regard: veto over foreign military alliances, protection of Russian-speaking minorities, integration into Russian-led economic and security structures (the Eurasian Economic Union, the CSTO). Where states accept this — Belarus, Kazakhstan (with limits), Armenia (until recently) — relations function. Where they refuse — Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova — Moscow uses everything from energy pressure to frozen conflicts (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Donbas) to open war. The war in Ukraine has strained this system badly: Central Asian states are hedging toward China, Turkey and the West, and Russian conventional military prestige has taken a serious hit.
The Russian map is defensive in self-image and expansive in practice — the two are not, from Moscow, contradictory. A country that has no natural borders, that has been invaded catastrophically three times in two centuries, and that watched a hostile military alliance advance 1,000 km east in a generation regards frontier expansion as prudence, not aggression. The tragedy of the current moment is that this frame produced a war that is destroying Russia's own conventional army, eroding its sphere of influence, forcing dependence on China, and unifying the West in ways decades of NATO diplomacy could not. Whether the frame survives Putin — and whether a post-Putin Russia can imagine security in any way other than territorial buffer — is the question that will shape the entire post-Soviet space for the next generation.